A Pop Traditionalist

Wayne Thiebaud Draws On His Commerical Past

April 27, 1986|By Alan G. Artner, Art critic.

Who could have guessed that one of the most satisfying artists of the 1980s would turn out to be Wayne Thiebaud?

Twenty years ago, when he was painting cakes and pies and other cafeteria foodstuffs, his work was grouped with that of the Pop artists as a commentary on mass-produced anonymity. Everything about his painting was supposed to be ironic. He was California`s poet of conspicuous consumption.

But now we see that Thiebaud was up to something else. His large retrospective exhibition organized in San Francisco last year has traveled to the Milwaukee Art Museum, and it confirms him not as an ironist but an upholder of tradition. At 64, he is, in fact, one of America`s outstanding realist painters.

How this came about involves a story of little dramatic incident. Thiebaud did not attend art school but began drawing cartoons as a teenager. He then worked briefly for Walt Disney Studios and as an illustrator. After World War II, he became a commercial artist for the Rexall Drug Co., where he gradually was attracted to the fine art from which advertising layouts were derived.

Thiebaud`s friendship with artist Robert Mallary was a turning point;

soon he was doing ``serious`` painting in both Expressionist and Cubist styles. This led to studies in art history, theory and education. While working toward a master`s degree, he also began teaching.

During the early 1950s Thiebaud formed a film production company, designed theater sets, executed works of public art and participated in several group exhibitions. But the art scene in Sacramento, Calif., was limited, and after a brief stay in Manhattan (which prompted him to found Sacramento`s first co-operative gallery), his course was decided. In 1956 Thiebaud returned to New York, where for a year he assimilated the lessons of Abstract Expressionism.

The Milwaukee exhibition begins with ``Coffee`` (1961), a representational painting that indicates what Thiebaud made of his East Coast experience. Its lone cup on a barren table looks ahead to his pictures of isolated commonplace objects, but the handling still is dynamic and the subject is not without debt to Richard Diebenkorn, another California painter. Soon enough, though, Thiebaud sounds a more personal note, as he begins to capture qualities of fluorescent light and turns his stroke into an equivalent for the ``artistry`` of the cook and cake decorator. This application is so appropriate that a spectator responds less to the paint than to the touch and taste gratifications of each subject. We feel no hint of irony. Instead, there is a wonderful transference, as more than one sense gets satisfied by sight.

Given that the exhibition presents Thiebaud`s work according to category

--that is, still life, figure and landscape--one can trace his mastery in paintings and drawings of each type. The still lifes prove the most varied, for there he records particularities of a wide range of subjects, from food and desk implements to flowers, shoes and even a pile of neckties. Yet nothing is marked by specious drama. Interest is held through the handling of light.

Thiebaud`s early still lifes all have objects set against a light ground, but at the beginning of the `80s there came a series in which candy apples, shoes and a lipstick emerge from the dark. Each object seems to glow with its own light, and nowhere is this as arresting as in two flower pieces from 1984. ``Boxed Rose`` simply reverses the placement of light against dark from an earlier figure composition, ``Woman in Tub`` (1965). However, ``Pinned Rose`` provides a startling new frisson by allowing chrome-plated metal into the ``natural`` atmosphere of blossom and wood. This can be viewed as some sort of commentary, but that would take us away from the truth. Thiebaud is not a symbolic painter; in fact, the flower and push-pin both are artificial. His interest lies in how the push-pin concentrates illumination. Here, as elsewhere, the power is in the light.

By comparison, Thiebaud`s paintings of figures are not as successful. One admires them for their vacancy, but that satisfaction is slight. The deadpan presentation does not quite achieve the distance Thiebaud was after. Beside the chiselled coolness of his drawing of a dog, the figure paintings look awkward rather than objectified.

But then the exhibition offers landscapes that are as strong as anything the artist has done. And this strength is owing to how beautifully the pictures embrace extremes. ``Cliffs`` (1968), for example, is Thiebaud`s largest canvas (101 by 88 inches) and his most obviously abstract, echoing Morris Louis` veils of transparent color. Even at the distance of 18 years, it is for him an unusually daring piece, one that marks landscape as the area in which he will take the biggest risks.